Clipper combo was tough to stop

Sunday

Nov 18, 2012 at 3:15 AM

By John Doylejdoyle@fosters.com Twitter: @JohnDoyle603

PORTSMOUTH — Nothing like a championship to make a pair of broken players whole again.

Quarterback Donovan Phanor and tight end Colin MacDonald capped a season riddled with injuries by combining for 358 yards total offense and two touchdowns in the Portsmouth High School football team’s 54-27 drubbing of Goffstown on Saturday in the Division III championship game.

“I told him ‘I will break my body for you,’” Phanor said he said to MacDonald earlier in the week. “All those throws that were a little bit underthrown, he just went up there and he got them.

Phanor overcame an interception on the second play of the game — one that led directly to a Goffstown touchdown and a quick 7-0 lead for the visitors — and showed remarkable poise throughout the afternoon, throwing 9 for 16 for 180 yards and deftly scrambling out of a number of jams. He also rushed for 178 yards.

“It didn’t even faze me at that point,” Phanor said. “It was just on to the next one. My team is very supportive of me and they’re the reason we got this far.”

Clippers coach Bill Murphy wasn’t surprised that Phanor picked himself up so quickly following the early INT.

“If you’re going to be a quarterback, you have to do that,” Murphy said. “He’s a very poised young man and he has been (all) along. We’re fortunate to have him. (He) did an exceptional job. When he’s healthy, he can run the ball.”

His favorite target all afternoon was MacDonald, who used his considerable height to burn defenders. He caught six passes for 158 yards. On one play, he faked out his defender and found himself wide open in the back corner of the end zone, hauling in Phanor’s second-down pass for a 35-yard touchdown that gave Portsmouth its first lead of the day.

It was the second big game for MacDonald against Goffstown this season, as he caught three touchdown passes for 75 yards in a 56-22 regular-season win over the Grizzlies on Dept. 29.

“They couldn’t handle me the last time, and they couldn’t handle me again,” said MacDonald. “I’m not trying to sound cocky, but they couldn’t handle our passing game.”

It was sweet redemption for Phanor, a junior, who missed the final two games of the regular season with a knee injury. He returned in time for No. 3 Portsmouth’s 7-0 semifinal victory at Milford last Saturday.

“I’ve never been injured so many times in my life,” Phanor said. “That’s just the style of play that I have. I run the ball and I can’t help it. To come back here and to be able to win this with my team after all these injuries, it’s incredible.”

MacDonald suffered his fair share of injuries as well, missing three games with a completely torn MCL. If he was feeling any ill-effects of the injury on Saturday, it didn’t show.

“This was the most up-and-down season I’ve ever had in any sport,” MacDonald said. “We had suspensions, we had injuries, we had our best receiver go down, and I went down. We had no passing game.”

The pair hooked up for another touchdown with 18 seconds to go in the third quarter, when Phanor hit MacDonald for a 27-yard score that gave the Clippers a 41-14 lead.

Phanor threw two big passes to MacDonald on the previous drive, one for 28 yards which MacDonald caught on a roll and one for 24 that required him to outreach his nearest defender. That gave the Clippers first-and-goal from the 6, and Phanor ran it in two plays later for one of his two rushing touchdowns.

“They’re both good athletes,” Murphy said of Phanor and MacDonald. “We’ve always had that capability, except at one time or another, one was injured and the other one wasn’t. Today, it worked out. They gave us some opportunities to get Colin free and Donovan was able to get the ball to him.”

After Goffstown scored early in the fourth quarter to cut Portsmouth’s lead to 41-20, Phanor squashed any hopes the visitors had of a miracle comeback when he ran 54 yards on the third play of the Clippers’ next drive. That put the ball at the 1, where Dillon Crosby took it in on the next play to give Portsmouth a 48-20 lead and put the game on ice.

“Today, our offense just exploded like a volcano, man,” MacDonald said. “There are no other words to describe it. We exploded.”